Muck City (28 page)

The greeting wall at Effie C. Grear Field lists past championships and players who have gone pro.

I
f the Glades Central Raiders needed one thing to correct their path to meet Cocoa, it was to lose to a 3–3 team like Dillard. As Hester saw it, losing was a release. Gone was the boyish bravado and the weight of a national ranking that had hung around their necks. Only humility remained, the greatest teaching aid of all.

If ever a player should be humbled, it was Benjamin. Despite eighty-eight yards and a touchdown, he’d fumbled twice and given up fourteen points. When the coaching staff met afterward to review film, they grew
even more exasperated watching the rest of his game: not blocking, not running hard to meet plays, not lining up correctly. The little things.

“He say anything about those fumbles?” Coach Randy asked.

Hester shook his head. “That boy don’t own up to nothin.”

As Hester knew too well, everyone had bad games. But with KB, the performance against Dillard seemed to say everything about his season, his attitude toward work and discipline, and the great disappointment they all feared he would become. The only positive thing to come from it, said Randy, was knowing that KB would soon be gone.

Because Benjamin had repeated two grades in school, he’d reached the maximum age allowed for high school athletics. The Florida High School Athletic Association rules forbade students older than nineteen years and nine months to compete in organized sports, a limit KB would reach in two weeks. Which meant Glades Central’s next game against Boynton Beach would be Benjamin’s last as a Raider. His teammates would have to carry on without him.

Publicly, coaches reacted as expected when losing a superstar.

“No question about it, that’s a big loss, the kind of talent he brings to the team,” Hester told a reporter after the Dillard game.

On paper, that was true. Benjamin remained the second-highest scorer on the team behind Jaime. His mannish physique and natural athleticism were enough to guarantee at least one highlight each Friday night. And those moments could be rapturous to witness. But in the locker room and on the practice field, coaches were now seeing KB as little more than deadweight, a poison in the well.

As team captain, his open refusals to run hard and do push-ups, his sleeping during film, his blasé indifference, were what coaches saw as a key contributor to the team’s internal problems. The behavior had already infected Jaime. Watching the Dillard film, Jaime would pop off the line, then start walking once the ball went elsewhere, refusing to block. When Mario passed him over again, he appeared to pitch a full-on tantrum.

“KB’s just a distraction at this point,” said Coach Randy. “We already got too many prima donnas on this team. But we gonna show everybody that we don’t need them to win.

“Listen, Randy Moss is the best damn receiver in the game of football, and the Vikings just told Randy Moss to go fuck himself. You’re never indispensable.”

“KB’s certainly not a game changer this year,” said Coach JD. “Defenses aren’t even changing their game plans because of him. I think we’ll do better without him.”

No one was more disappointed by KB’s performance than Hester, who, like any head coach, had allowed himself to dream about the juggernaut they could’ve built with such a phenomenal talent. There were even times during the season when Hester considered kicking Benjamin off the team but changed his mind.

“You have to give a guy a choice to want it or not,” Hester said. “If you tell him to leave and go, he’ll say that people didn’t care. Whatever happens, the only thing KB can ever say is that he let his team down. He can never say we gave up on him.

“Some kids can’t handle success. The more success he had, the less he wanted to work. You start believing what you read. He knew that physically in high school he didn’t have to work. And he didn’t.”

But the reality was that KB had never asked for the captain’s role, something that tended to get overlooked in the mania of a title-seeking season. Benjamin was nearly twenty years old and playing on a team of mostly sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys. He was in a steady relationship with an older woman—Mika Lemene, a former Raider cheerleader who was twenty-two and worked a full-time job at the Boys and Girls Club. KB had spent more than a year in jail and grown up without a father, and his mother had lived on the fringes of poverty and trouble for so long that each day she woke up in her apartment on the edge of the canefield and rang his phone was a small miracle.

Benjamin respected Hester and loved being a Raider. (“I didn’t know anything when I first came here,” he once said. “He taught me everything.”) But unlike Mario, he had nothing to prove with the maroon and gold. For KB, the Raiders were merely a means to an end. His future was locked, and his mind was miles ahead.

•   •   •

IF ANYTHING, HESTER
was hoping that Benjamin’s exit would make room for a true leader to fill the vacuum, and for other kids to find their confidence to shine.

“A lot of these guys have been too intimidated to step up with KB around,” he said. “After he’s gone, we’ll see who the true players are.”

The morning after the defeat, the coach had gone out for an early look. Each Saturday following a game, the team was urged to attend a nine thirty prayer breakfast at the Baptist church, hosted by Pastor Dez, one that also drew many players from the Glades Day squad. Before leaving Dillard on Friday, Hester had made attendance mandatory, using it as a gauge to see “who had the guts to face themselves and their teammates” after such an embarrassment. When Hester arrived at the church that morning, he saw Mario, Davonte, Oliver, and about twelve others. He did not see KB or Jaime.

As the players sat down to plates of scrambled eggs, bacon, and cheese grits, Pastor Dez preached on the deception of beauty. He told of being a boy in Jamaica and loving the flavor of mangoes. One year he found a tree near his home and devoured the low-hanging fruit. Thinking he’d stripped the tree clean, he noticed another one. It was red-ripe and succulent to the eye, the most delicious-looking mango he’d ever seen. But it hung on the highest branch, making it irresistible. So Dez started climbing, battling ants and slippery limbs, until he finally reached the mango and held it in his grasp. But when he bit into its flesh, he found that it was full of worms.

The same message could be gleaned, he said, from one of the parables Jesus told about the sowers of wheat. In the parable, which appears in the book of Matthew, enemies have entered a field of good stout grain and sown it with seeds of darnel, a weed resembling wheat.

“Looking at this field from afar,” Dez explained, “some stalks are broad and upright, looking tall and mighty, while others are leaning toward the ground. But walk into that field and you’ll discover the tall plants are only barren weeds, while the smaller, more humble stalks are full and heavy with fruit.”

If anyone in the room fit that description, it was Davonte.

His transition across town from the small private Glades Day School to Glades Central had been much greater than the single mile it covered. The schools were different in almost every way. Glades Day was mostly white and more affluent, with yearly tuition for the upper school at $7,975. Many of the teachers were Glades natives whose families had lived there for generations. With an enrollment of 328 students across the twenty-two-acre campus, classes were smaller and academic performance was higher.

But when it came to football, the only difference was the alternate universe that seemed to separate the two. Just like the Raiders, the Glades Day Gators had won six state championships, along with seventeen regional titles. Their Friday-night home games also drew hundreds, including many who still attended decades after sons and brothers had graduated. But unlike Glades Central, Glades Day had a spirited “touchdown club” that hosted rib-eye dinners each Tuesday night during the season and spread Gator pride by flag and farm truck, casting a visible shadow across the Raider nation.

Glades Day played in the tiny, single-A classification and had never met the crosstown Raiders on the field. There existed no fever-pitched rivalry as there did between Glades Central and Pahokee, who also played in a different division. It was as if the Belle Glade Rams and Lake Shore Bobcats had simply regrouped after the onus of history had passed.

Despite the differences, fans of both teams enjoyed each other’s full support, especially during the postseason. In 2006, when the Raiders, Gators,
and
Blue Devils all won state championships—a phenomenon known as the “Muck City Sweep”—many joked that the confluence of power was just enough to usher Christ himself back to Earth.

“What fans of both schools have in common is they both roll,” said Mike Diagostine, who calls the play-by-play for all three schools on WSWN Sugar 900. “Wherever Glades Day goes, the Gator faithful go, and wherever Glades Central goes, the Raider faithful go. And when they’re both in the championships, both sides will come together and try to fill that Citrus Bowl. They’re staying all weekend.”

Glades Day started offering scholarships to local black students and athletes decades ago. And for years, that Muck City speed had given the Gators the edge over its prep-school competitors. The previous year, Davonte and his cousin Johntavis Brown were both starting receivers who could unzip the defense of a Jupiter Christian or a Zion Lutheran with relative ease. But the problem was that Glades Day rarely threw the ball, mainly on account of a steamrolling running back named Kelvin Taylor.

Kelvin was Fred Taylor’s son. At age sixteen, he already bore a striking resemblance to his father, complete with heavy ink up and down both arms and a neck like a Sunday ham. Blessed with furious speed and power, Taylor was certainly the most phenomenal athlete ever to play at Glades Day, and arguably one of the best ever to spring from the muck. When the Gators took the field, few teams could stop him. During his freshman season, Taylor had averaged 185 yards per game and broken the state’s single-season touchdown record with forty-nine. Now a sophomore, he was rapidly closing in on the state’s all-time high-school rushing record of 8,804 yards, held by NFL Hall of Famer Emmitt Smith during his years at Escambia High.

Taylor regularly attended the Saturday-morning breakfasts. He was reserved and respectful around adults, and quietly answered questions with
sir
and
ma’am
. For instance:

So how was your game last night?

Three fifty.

Three hundred and fifty
yards
?

Yes sir.

With Taylor as their bull-necked Trojan horse, the Gators won the title in 2009, defeating Warner Christian in the Citrus Bowl the day before Glades Central dropped its game against Cocoa.

In that game, Davonte had two catches for fifty-eight yards. When the clock hit zero and the Gators had won, he ran onto the field and embraced his teammates, jumping up and down in a rare moment of public exuberance. Afterward, a runaway smile was spread across his face as he leaned down to accept the gold medal.

The Gators had ordered championship rings: a golden football with a crown of diamonds around a green emerald and the numeral 1 posted like a flag in the center of the stone. He’d worn the ring every day, loved the way it looked from different angles while he sat in church or in class. Its heaviness made him think of two-a-days in the August sun.

At night, he would place the ring beside the black King James Bible on the shelf in his room. It was his first real Bible, the one his grandmother Nora had given him when he was eight. Its pages were now marked with ink and its cover soft and weathered from a decade of service.

The ring and the memories of that day were keepsakes of a family that would always be bonded in time. But the smashmouth running Gators were no place for an aspiring receiver with dreams of college and beyond. So with a championship now under his wing, Davonte left Glades Day and the shadow of Taylor to go fly with the Raiders.

As Davonte discovered, the culture at Glades Central more closely mirrored the town: It was loud and brash and everything he was not. It was a place so insular that everyone seemed to share the same thousand Facebook friends—kids with wild and colorful monikers such as Bootz Lynch, Rivermonster Humphrey, LemonadeGame Tharpe, Badlegs Brown, and Interstate Frank. The first week Davonte arrived, his new teammates
made fun of his khaki pants, which he wore in a normal fashion, around his waist. “Church boy got no swag,” they teased. And when he returned several weeks later with his jeans sagging off his butt, his coaches sighed in defeat.

“They finally corrupted him,” said one.

•   •   •

A PECKING ORDER
was firmly in place on the Raider team that Davonte joined. The squad was already loaded with topflight receivers in KB and Jaime, and others who’d come up in the program. But among this corps of players whose egos tended to spiral into the heavens, Hester noticed that Davonte was one of the few to follow advice.